The shares, despite a strong debut, are a few pennies below the offer price and sentiment will not be helped by the management's cack-handed approach to pay negotiations. Two months on from flotation and QinetiQ, the defence research business, is failing to keep up. In this case, it's already clear that Goldman Sachs, the top name in the Tchenguiz bid consortium, has dropped out. It is surely reasonable that an uninvited would-be bidder should be prepared to be open about such basic issues as the security of funding and plans for the pension fund.

M&B's chairman, Roger Carr, would like to see something in writing before making a response and his stance is far from being a stalling tactic.

Tchenguiz's approach suffers the double problem that he has yet to provide detailed terms and conditions. The new rules of the game must deeply irritate private equity firms, which have raised record sums for investment only to find their approaches being sniffed at. Marks & Spencer, motoring towards 600p (rather than Philip Green's 400p), and the London Stock Exchange (at £12, not the 950p Nasdaq proposed a couple of months ago) have changed the public-to-private game.īoards, and even some institutional shareholders, have worked out that patience is sometimes rewarded.

Well, yes it is, but the world has moved on since the days when a private equity bidder needed only to add 30% to a share price to be confident of seeing a board roll over. It didn't work then and it probably won't now because Tchenguiz's problem is simple: 550p a share is nowhere near a knock-out price and is a full 50p short of being even mildly tempting.īut, pleads the Tchenguiz camp, it's 35% more than M&B's share price before we came along. Along the way, he has bristled with indignation that M&B didn't invite him round for a quick half to talk terms, and he couldn't resist another dig yesterday. It has taken a full month for Tchenguiz to get from initial expression of interest in M&B to yesterday's 'informal approach' at 550p a share. Robert Tchenguiz is not obliged to stoop to charm offensives but it's not doing him much good in his attempt to force the board of Mitchells & Butlers to the negotiating table.

M&b record exchange